We switched up to the 50 Mbyte Virgin Cable service a few weeks back - looking for still faster internet connection. Most of the time, our traffic levels don't need such a high speed link, but we've two dedicated servers (housed in England and Germany) and we need to take incremental and occasionally full backups - and at such times the service provides a seriously shorter transfer. It's also good for faster upload at the times we're viewing webcams over the link.

But, curiously, browsing speeds hadn't improved. A distinct pause from page to page, and a message at the base of the browser "looking up www.google.com" or some other domain name gave us the clue ... the DNS servers that we've been using appear to have been overloaded, or are perhaps being used to throttle back traffic.

Chris pointed me in the direction of Google's public DNS service, with a DNS server at 8.8.8.8 and another at 8.8.4.4 - see [here] for details - and a switch to using those machines gave an immediate obvious improvement. I've switched a couple of our systems to use the Google service, and I'm going to watch how it goes. And perhaps we should set up a local DNS server at the hotel and at HQ to cache address lookups.

We will see some other differences ... a mistyped domain name that points to something that's not registered has been leading to a Virgin Media search results page; now it leads in many circumstances to Google's best guess. So there's another positive outcome. Part of me worries that Google is becoming a bit of a monopoly, but they're providing a technically excellent product once again. (written 2009-12-14, updated 2009-12-15)

Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles

G206 - Well House Consultants - Our training centre[4012] A course is not just for a year - its for a career - (2013-02-20)[3545] Finding all matches to a pattern in Perl regular expressions - (2011-12-09)[2943] Our facilities to support Well House Consultants Courses - (2010-09-02)[2926] Journey times to Melksham, Wiltshire - (2010-08-17)[2660] One number for Well House - 01225 708225 - (2010-03-04)[2538] Open Source Training Centre and Courses for 2010 - (2009-12-16)[2126] Weeding out old phone numbers - (2009-04-11)[1240] Fancy going to Glastonbury? - (2007-06-22)[1200] Training information - England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland - (2007-05-22)[640] Training Centre Pictures - (2006-03-09)[627] JIT or JAU - (2006-02-27)[448] Out of the norm. - (2005-09-23)[256] Spring is in the air - (2005-03-24)[53] Drive the drive - (2004-09-18)

M153 - Well House Manor - Training Facilities[3816] Want to escape the Olympics? Learn to program in the countryside! - (2012-07-23)[3612] Help to get online in Melksham - (2012-02-13)[3521] Emergency First Aid at Work (HSE) training in Melksham - places available for 19.1.2012 - (2011-11-15)[1227] Melksham businesses - networking together - (2007-06-10)[379] Getting the lighting right - (2005-07-15)

This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at
http://www.wellho.net/horse/ -
the diary and writings of Graham Ellis.
Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the
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releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via
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